Glad to hear that you made it out into the wilds for a few hours (days?) and that your heart felt the lightness of fellowship with God during that time.

I spent most of a whole day at the estuary side, last week, and another hour just two days ago. I am a birder and the time just flew by as I sat in the hide with biscuits and coffee and a radio to keep track of the English cricket match taking place.

I saw redshanks, cormorants, a curlew, a buzzard and the fleetingest (and my first ever) glimpse of a beautiful green woodpecker. Another highlight was a peregrine falcon which spooked a huge flock of curlews and sent hundreds of them into spiralling waves of flight above the estuary — what a sight!

Such times as these are refreshing to our souls like little else. Yet your story also captured the sadness of tragedy which our hearts can bear when they are refreshed — in a way they can’t when they are weighed down and feel the weight of our own personal ‘tragedies’ too deeply to take on thoughts of others…

Perhaps that is what true refreshment, true re-creation is all about: the redemption of our hearts and souls: not FROM tragedy, but from the smallness of our own individual horizons, so that we can, once again, engage with the tragedies which form part of the present order of things.

We can bear the weight of sharing in the lives of others, without needing to distance ourselves because of the brokenness, fallenness and pain we encounter.

Understood like this, recreation is a must. It is recuperation from the past and preparation for the future. It is being restored in order to serve and live an abundant life, which includes remnants and reminders of both Eden and Golgotha.

shalom

John